For the first few days after arriving in Barbados, we attended the informal 2016 Nordhavn Barbados Rendezvous with Robbie and Jo Ashton of Nordhavn 47 Southern Star and Jennifer and Mark Ullmann of Nordhavn 46 Starlet. They’d just crossed the Atlantic together from the Cape Verde Islands and had arrived in Barbados a few days…
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A Bit of a Setback on Dirona
Yesterday evening, Jennifer got hit by a snapping line from the super yacht on the dock beside us. The line hit hard enough to break Jen’s clavicle (collar) bone. It’s now a bit of a mess with the bone broken through, displaced and overlapping. The doctors are confident it will heal well but I know…
Barbados Arrival
We arrived into Barbados 25 days and 3,689 nm after leaving St. Helena. We’re told this is the longest non-stop run in a Nordhavn under 100ft. Including the 11-day, 1,711 nm trip from Cape Town to St. Helena, we’d been at sea six weeks to the day between Cape Town and Barbados, and covered exactly…
500 miles to Barbados
By January 31st, we’d covered another 1,500 miles on our 3,650-mile journey from St. Helena to Barbados and had been at sea for three weeks. A lot happened in this portion of the trip. We crossed the equator and returned to the northern hemisphere after nearly three years away, and passed the halfway mark on…
Changing the Hydraulic Actuator
Stabilizers are used on ocean-going vessels to remove the discomfort of ocean swell. Generically they come in two broad forms, passive and active. Passive stabilizers are the metal fins that you might have seen hanging from outriggers on fishing trawlers. And, if you saw the movie The Perfect Storm, that was a passive stabilizer that…
Oil Change at Sea
Earlier this week, we brought the boat up on the wing engine and shut down the main engine to change the oil. Normally we’d never do this, even though the chance of a problem is small, because in the unlikely event that a problem does occur, it would be a very big problem. (See To…
3,650 to Barbados
We departed from St. Helena on our longest non-stop run so far: a one-month, 3,650 nautical mile passage to Barbados. We were always planning to stop at St. Helena, as we’d need to refuel enroute to most destinations after South Africa. From St. Helena, we’d gone through several iterations of trip planning before deciding on…
St. Helena Island Tour
On our last day in St. Helena we cleared out in the morning for a weekend departure and spent the rest of the day on a custom island tour with Derek Richards of No Limits Travel and Tours. We generally don’t like the constraints of a guided tour and initially were planning to hire a…
St. Helena Museum and Munden’s Point
On our fourth day at St. Helena, we learned more about the island’s history, geology and ecology at the excellent St. Helena museum, and visited St. James Church, the oldest Anglican church in the Southern Hemisphere. We also walked a track around Munden’s Point to Rupert’s Bay to see the new wharf and port facilities…
To Change or Not to Change? That is the Question.
Oil changes at sea get pretty close to a universal response from boaters I know. Everyone says loudly “DON’T DO IT.” The risk of something going wrong when hundreds, if not a thousand miles, from shore is simply too high. And, with oil change intervals ranging between 250 and 375 hours, there typically is no…
